Re: Re: feedback on Solr 4.x LotsOfCores feature

2013-10-11 Thread Erick Erickson
bq: sharing the underlying solrconfig object the configset introduced
in JIRA SOLR-4478 seems to be the solution for non-SolrCloud mode

SOLR-4478 will NOT share the underlying config objects, it simply
shares the underlying directory. Each core will, at least as presently
envisioned, simply read the files that exist there and create their
own solrconfig object. Schema objects may be shared, but not config
objects. It may turn out to be relatively easy to do in the configset
situation, but last time I looked at sharing the underlying config
object it was too fraught with problems.

bq: 15K cores is around 4 minutes

I find this very odd. On my laptop, spinning disk, I think I was
seeing 1k cores discovered/sec. You're seeing roughly 16x slower, so I
have no idea what's going on here. If this is just reading the files,
you should be seeing horrible disk contention. Are you on some kind of
networked drive?

bq: To do that in background and to block on that request until core
discovery is complete, should not work for us (due to the worst case).
What other choices are there? Either you have to do it up front or
with some kind of blocking. Hmmm, I suppose you could keep some kind
of custom store (DB? File? ZooKeeper?) that would keep the last known
layout. You'd still have some kind of worst-case situation where the
core you were trying to load wouldn't be in your persistent store and
you'd _still_ have to wait for the discovery process to complete.

bq: and we will use the cores Auto option to create load or only load
the core on
Interesting. I can see how this could all work without any core
discovery but it does require a very specific setup.

On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 11:42 AM, Soyez Olivier
olivier.so...@worldline.com wrote:
 The corresponding patch for Solr 4.2.1 LotsOfCores can be found in SOLR-5316, 
 including the new Cores options :
 - numBuckets to create a subdirectory based on a hash on the corename % 
 numBuckets in the core Datadir
 - Auto with 3 differents values :
   1) false : default behaviour
   2) createLoad : create, if not exist, and load the core on the fly on the 
 first incoming request (update, select)
   3) onlyLoad : load the core on the fly on the first incoming request 
 (update, select), if exist on disk

 Concerning :
 - sharing the underlying solrconfig object, the configset introduced in JIRA 
 SOLR-4478 seems to be the solution for non-SolrCloud mode.
 We need to test it for our use case. If another solution exists, please tell 
 me. We are very interested in such functionality and to contribute, if we can.

 - the possibility of lotsOfCores in SolrCloud, we don't know in details how 
 SolrCloud is working.
 But one possible limit is the maximum number of entries that can be added to 
 a zookeeper node.
 Maybe, a solution will be just a kind of hashing in the zookeeper tree.

 - the time to discover cores in Solr 4.4 : with spinning disk under linux, 
 all cores with transient=true and loadOnStartup=false, the linux buffer 
 cache empty before starting Solr :
 15K cores is around 4 minutes. It's linear in the cores number, so for 50K 
 it's more than 13 minutes. In fact, it corresponding to the time to read all 
 core.properties files.
 To do that in background and to block on that request until core discovery is 
 complete, should not work for us (due to the worst case).
 So, we will just disable the core Discovery, because we don't need to know 
 all cores from the start. Start Solr without any core entries in solr.xml, 
 and we will use the cores Auto option to create load or only load the core on 
 the fly, based on the existence of the core on the disk (absolute path 
 calculated from the core name).

 Thanks for your interest,

 Olivier
 
 De : Erick Erickson [erickerick...@gmail.com]
 Date d'envoi : lundi 7 octobre 2013 14:33
 À : solr-user@lucene.apache.org
 Objet : Re: feedback on Solr 4.x LotsOfCores feature

 Thanks for the great writeup! It's always interesting to see how
 a feature plays out in the real world. A couple of questions
 though:

 bq: We added 2 Cores options :
 Do you mean you patched Solr? If so are you willing to shard the code
 back? If both are yes, please open a JIRA, attach the patch and assign
 it to me.

 bq:  the number of file descriptors, it used a lot (need to increase global
 max and per process fd)

 Right, this makes sense since you have a bunch of cores all with their
 own descriptors open. I'm assuming that you hit a rather high max
 number and it stays pretty steady

 bq: the overhead to parse solrconfig.xml and load dependencies to open
 each core

 Right, I tried to look at sharing the underlying solrconfig object but
 it seemed pretty hairy. There are some extensive comments in the
 JIRA of the problems I foresaw. There may be some action on this
 in the future.

 bq: lotsOfCores doesn’t work with SolrCloud

 Right, we haven't concentrated on that, it's an interesting problem

Re: Re: feedback on Solr 4.x LotsOfCores feature

2013-10-10 Thread Soyez Olivier
The corresponding patch for Solr 4.2.1 LotsOfCores can be found in SOLR-5316, 
including the new Cores options :
- numBuckets to create a subdirectory based on a hash on the corename % 
numBuckets in the core Datadir
- Auto with 3 differents values :
  1) false : default behaviour
  2) createLoad : create, if not exist, and load the core on the fly on the 
first incoming request (update, select)
  3) onlyLoad : load the core on the fly on the first incoming request (update, 
select), if exist on disk

Concerning :
- sharing the underlying solrconfig object, the configset introduced in JIRA 
SOLR-4478 seems to be the solution for non-SolrCloud mode.
We need to test it for our use case. If another solution exists, please tell 
me. We are very interested in such functionality and to contribute, if we can.

- the possibility of lotsOfCores in SolrCloud, we don't know in details how 
SolrCloud is working.
But one possible limit is the maximum number of entries that can be added to a 
zookeeper node.
Maybe, a solution will be just a kind of hashing in the zookeeper tree.

- the time to discover cores in Solr 4.4 : with spinning disk under linux, all 
cores with transient=true and loadOnStartup=false, the linux buffer cache 
empty before starting Solr :
15K cores is around 4 minutes. It's linear in the cores number, so for 50K it's 
more than 13 minutes. In fact, it corresponding to the time to read all 
core.properties files.
To do that in background and to block on that request until core discovery is 
complete, should not work for us (due to the worst case).
So, we will just disable the core Discovery, because we don't need to know all 
cores from the start. Start Solr without any core entries in solr.xml, and we 
will use the cores Auto option to create load or only load the core on the fly, 
based on the existence of the core on the disk (absolute path calculated from 
the core name).

Thanks for your interest,

Olivier

De : Erick Erickson [erickerick...@gmail.com]
Date d'envoi : lundi 7 octobre 2013 14:33
À : solr-user@lucene.apache.org
Objet : Re: feedback on Solr 4.x LotsOfCores feature

Thanks for the great writeup! It's always interesting to see how
a feature plays out in the real world. A couple of questions
though:

bq: We added 2 Cores options :
Do you mean you patched Solr? If so are you willing to shard the code
back? If both are yes, please open a JIRA, attach the patch and assign
it to me.

bq:  the number of file descriptors, it used a lot (need to increase global
max and per process fd)

Right, this makes sense since you have a bunch of cores all with their
own descriptors open. I'm assuming that you hit a rather high max
number and it stays pretty steady

bq: the overhead to parse solrconfig.xml and load dependencies to open
each core

Right, I tried to look at sharing the underlying solrconfig object but
it seemed pretty hairy. There are some extensive comments in the
JIRA of the problems I foresaw. There may be some action on this
in the future.

bq: lotsOfCores doesn’t work with SolrCloud

Right, we haven't concentrated on that, it's an interesting problem.
In particular it's not clear what happens when nodes go up/down,
replicate, resynch, all that.

bq: When you start, it spend a lot of times to discover cores due to a big

How long? I tried 15K cores on my laptop and I think I was getting 15
second delays or roughly 1K cores discovered/second. Is your delay
on the order of 50 seconds with 50K cores?

I'm not sure how you could do that in the background, but I haven't
thought about it much. I tried multi-threading core discovery and that
didn't help (SSD disk), I assumed that the problem was mostly I/O
contention (but didn't prove it). What if a request came in for a core
before you'd found it? I'm not sure what the right behavior would be
except perhaps to block on that request until core discovery was
complete. Hm. How would that work for your case? That
seems do-able.

BTW, so far you get the prize for the most cores on a node I think.

Thanks again for the great feedback!

Erick

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 3:53 AM, Soyez Olivier
olivier.so...@worldline.com wrote:
 Hello,

 In my company, we use Solr in production to offer full text search on
 mailboxes.
 We host dozens million of mailboxes, but only webmail users have such
 feature (few millions).
 We have the following use case :
 - non static indexes with more update (indexing and deleting), than
 select requests (ratio 7:1)
 - homogeneous configuration for all indexes
 - not so much user at the same time

 We started to index mailboxes with Solr 1.4 in 2010, on a subset of
 400,000 users.
 - we had a cluster of 50 servers, 4 Solr per server, 2000 users per Solr
 instance
 - we grow to 6000 users per Solr instance, 8 Solr per server, 60Go per
 index (~2 million users)
 - we upgraded to Solr 3.5 in 2012
 As indexes grew, IOPS and the response times have increased more and more